Election 2016 live blog: Updates from Election Day in Colorado and nationwide

HERSHEY, PA - NOVEMBER 04: Donald Trump walks onto stage at a rally only days before the presidential election on November 4, 2016 in Hershey, Pennsylvania. As both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump make their final pitches to the American people, recent polls show a tightening race in crucial swing states. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Spencer Platt

2016 Getty Images

DENVER – Denver7 will update this live blog throughout Election Day and Wednesday with news from Colorado and across the nation. Post are in reverse-chronological order. For more, head over to our Election 2016 page.

Though ballots are still being counted in Colorado and final tallies won’t be known for several weeks, data released Wednesday by the Secretary of State’s Office give some insight into how powerful the unaffiliated vote was in the state’s presidential election.

The City of Denver still has about 140,000 ballots to count, officials told Denver7.

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10:22 a.m.

President Obama spoke from the White House.

"She has lived a life of extraordinary public service," said Obama about Clinton.

"If we lose, we learn from our mistakes," Obama said. "The point is we all go forward."

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10:09 a.m.

Colorado's state legislature will stay split, with Republicans maintaining control of the Senate and Democrats retaining their House majority.

Republican Kevin Priola defeated Democrat Jenise May in an Adams County Senate district currently held by Democrat Mary Hodge, who didn't seek re-election.

Priola's win ensures Republicans will retain at least a one-seat majority in the 35-seat Senate.

Democrats have retained their advantage in the state House. Democrats picked up a seat in Adams County when Dafna Michaelson Jenet defeated incumbent Republican Rep. JoAnn Windholz.

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10:01 a.m.

U.S. House & Senate update from the Associated Press:

In the U.S. House, the Republicans have won 238 seats and are leading in the races for 2 seats. The Democrats have won 192 seats and are leading in the races for 3 seats. The Republicans have retained control of the U.S. House.

In the U.S. Senate, the Republicans have won 21 seats and are leading in the race for 1 seat. The Democrats have won 11 seats and are leading in the races for 1 seat.

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10 a.m.

The Associated Press has called Alaska for Donald Trump.

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9:54 a.m.

Hillary Clinton has given her concession speech in New York.

"This is painful and it will be for a long time," Clinton said. "Being your candidate has been one of the great honors of my life."

On Donald Trump, Clinton said, "I hope he will be a successful President for all Americans."

"Our best days are still ahead of us," Clinton said. "We are stronger together."

"I am so grateful for our country and all it has given to me," said Clinton. "I count my blessings every single day that I am an American."

See the entire speech:

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9:05 a.m.

The Associated Press is calling more of Colorado's races.

Leslie Herod (D), elected State House, District 8, Colorado.

Alec Garnett (D), elected State House, District 2, Colorado.

Millie Hamner (D), elected State House, District 61, Colorado.

Susan Beckman (R), elected State House, District 38, Colorado.

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8:36 a.m.

We are still waiting for results in several Colorado Senate races.

Tom Sullivan, candidate for District 27, tweeted, "At this time, we do not have a definitive result on our race. Ballots are still being counted. We will update when we know more. Thank you."

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8:20 a.m.

President Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden are expected to speak at 10:15 a.m. MT

"Our goal from the beginning was to protect the U.S. Constitution, create more Colorado jobs and make our country safer and stronger. I am extremely proud of our campaign and believe our message was a good one. Though we were successful in starting a movement, we fell short in winning the race.

I congratulate Sen. Michael Bennet on his win and hope that he will work with Republican lawmakers to preserve Coloradan’s freedoms and western way of life.

Thank you to all the Colorado voters and volunteers that came out to support our campaign. Colorado is the home of a strong willed, passionate base of supporters who believe that together, we can build a better future for our children. I am honored to live in the greatest state in the nation and to call myself a Coloradan.

God bless you all and the United States of America."

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6:22 a.m.

Pope Francis tweeted this morning, "May we make God’s merciful love ever more evident in our world through dialogue, mutual acceptance and fraternal cooperation."

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6:15 a.m.

Hillary Clinton will speak at 7:30 a.m. MT. You can watch it live on Denver7, our app and our website: TheDenverChannel.com/live. (UPDATE: The speech has been moved to 8:30 a.m.)

The Associated Press has called all of the congressional races in Colorado and every incumbent was re-elected.

District 1: Diana DeGette (D)

District 2: Jared Polis (D)

District 3: Scott Tipton (R)

District 4: Ken Buck (R)

District 5: Doug Lamborn (R)

District 6: Mike Coffman (R)

District 7: Ed Perlmutter (D)

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5:20 a.m. Wednesday

The White House says President Obama has called Donald Trump to congratulate him on his victory. The President invited Trump to the White House on Thursday to update him on the transition planning that has already been done.

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5:14 a.m. Wednesday

It appears Denver voters have agreed to create a cannabis consumption pilot program that would allow a business or a person to allow the consumption of marijuana in a designated consumption area.

As of 1 a.m. when Denver released its last election results, the measure had 100,284 yes votes and 96,893 no votes. That's a margin of more than 1.5 percent.

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5:09 a.m. Wednesday

Voters in Boulder has passed a new tax on sugary drinks. Measure 2H won 54 percent of the vote.

2H will add an excise tax of two cents per ounce on the distribution of drinks with added sugar, and sweeteners used to produce such drinks. Some items are exempt from the tax including milk products, baby formula and alcohol.

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4:36 a.m.

Donald Trump is already tweeting this morning.

He wrote, "Such a beautiful and important evening! The forgotten man and woman will never be forgotten again. We will all come together as never before."

Donald Trump is the next President of the United States after The Associated Press called the race.

A huge underdog in the Republican primaries and in the General Election against Democrat Hillary Clinton, Trump and his camp continually said there was a “silent majority” that would turn out to vote for him on Election Day.

His prognostications held true Tuesday, as he took home the electoral college vote despite losing the popular vote to Clinton.

Colorado voters approved Proposition 107, which will re-establish presidential primary elections in Colorado and open them up to unaffiliated voters.

The measure passed by a 64 to 36 percent vote, according to numbers from The Associated Press.

Proposition 108 appears likely to pass, though it has not been called yet by the AP. If approved, 108 would allow unaffiliated voters to vote in a single party’s primary, and would also allow parties to opt out of holding primaries altogether and to instead use an assembly or convention to nominate candidates.

Proposition 108 differs from Proposition 107 in that it has nothing to do with presidential primaries, but rather would allow unaffiliated voters to cast a ballot in non-presidential primaries.

Republicans have clinched continued House control for the new Congress.

They'll likely lose seats from their current historic high, but they won enough seats to extend their six-year streak of commanding the chamber.

With results still being counted early Wednesday, Republicans have won at least 218 House seats. That exceeds the number needed to control the chamber.

Democrats started the year hoping Donald Trump's divisive presidential candidacy would cost Republicans bushels of House seats. His impact on down-ballot candidates proved spotty.

Republicans now control 247 seats in the House. With a smaller GOP majority, dissident hard-right conservatives could have added leverage to press House Speaker Paul Ryan and other party leaders on the budget and other issues.

-The Associated Press

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10:23 p.m.

The Associated Press has called Nevada for Hillary Clinton. The state was much-scrutinized ahead of Tuesday, as heavy turnouts among the Hispanic population likely pushed Clinton to victory.

Donald Trump's campaign sued earlier Tuesday to try and get some of those early votes tossed, but lost his motion.

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9:44 p.m.

Voters in both California and Massachusetts legalized recreational cannabis on Tuesday to join Colorado, Washington, Oregon and Alaska as the states that offer legal recreational cannabis.

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9:40 p.m.

Donald Trump now leads Hillary Clinton in electoral votes 232-209 after Georgia was called for Trump and Washington and Oregon were called for Clinton.

The states that have yet to be called are: Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Maine.

This would change Colorado statutes to allow any “mentally-capable” adult aged 18+ with a diagnosed terminal illness that leaves them six months or less to live to receive a prescription from a licensed physician that can be taken voluntarily to end their life.

With 34 percent reporting, "yes" leads "no" 66 to 34 percent.

Amendment 69, however, which would have created a single-payer health care system in Colorado, looks like it is dead in the water.

With 34 percent reporting, the "no" votes lead the "yes" votes 79 percent to 21 percent.

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7:31 p.m.

Early reporting in Jefferson County, which had a near-even split among returned ballots from Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters, remains close early. Clinton currently leads with 50 percent, compared to 42.3 percent for Trump.

Amendment 69, Colorado's proposed single-payer health care system, appears it will fail. Even among early vote totals, 81 percent of nearly 900,000 people voted against the measure.

7:20 p.m.

After about 900,000 votes in Colorado have been tallied, Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump 47.3 percent to 45.4 percent. Gary Johnson has 4.6 percent so far.

Donald Trump has now been named the winner in Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, West Virginia and South Carolina.

Hillary Clinton has been named the winner in Illinois, New York Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Vermont, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

Polls in Colorado are now closed, but any voters already in line as of 7 p.m. will be able to vote, no matter how long it takes. Colorado is among nearly a dozen states whose polls close at 7 p.m. We'll have more results coming in shortly here.

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6:49 p.m.

Denver District Court judge rules that polls will close at 7 p.m. as planned. No extension after 29-minute outage earlier this afternoon. Polls should be rolling in soon.

Judge Grant said polls did not essentially close during the outage, and pointed to the fact that everyone in line at 7 p.m. will still get to vote.

The judge said that while there have been some long lines reported, there is no evidence why exactly.

The judge argued that the logistics of trying to notify all polling locations and jurisdictions of the extension would be difficult, then denied the motion.

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6:44 p.m.

ABC News has determined the U.S. House of Representatives will remain in control of the Republicans.

Republicans continue to argue that voting should not be extended until 9 p.m. in Colorado, saying that people had weeks to vote, that Democrats' arguments are justified, and that there is now only 21 minutes to decide.

The decision is now in the judge's hands.

6:36 p.m.

The Pueblo County Clerk and Recorders Office said it is experiencing a five-hour delay in ballot counting after one of its servers filled up earlier Tuesday.

The Secretary of State’s Office replaced it, and the office is working on getting it up and running.

A spokesman for the office said only the count is delayed – no the vote. The spokesman said the office can count between 3,000 and 4,000 votes per hour, but no numbers will be reported while people are still in line.

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6:29 p.m.

The judge overseeing the hearing as to whether or not to extend voting times in Colorado asked how doing so would help people who didn't want to wait in long lines.

Lawyers for the Democrats said they want to give people who might have left a chance to come back and vote, adding they would count on the press to get the word out that times had been extended.

They argue that North Carolina extended polling hours for "similar" reasons.

Lawyers for the Republicans argued that evidence shows "not one single voter" has been turned away from polls, arguing Democrats were asking for an extension only in order to get people to vote who didn't show up before 7 p.m.

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6:17 p.m.

The Denver Election Director is on the stand now in the Colorado voting time extension hearing, and is testifying that there were two different outages today, and that the office has "never been able to sort of recover" from the second, larger outage.

The director said two sites in Denver currently have two-hour waits.

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6:15 p.m.

Marco Rubio failed in his bid to end up in the White House, but he's still going back to Washington. Florida voters elected him to a second term in the Senate on Tuesday.

He had wavered for months before deciding to run for re-election. He beat back a challenge from Democratic Rep. Patrick Murphy, who has repeatedly tried to link Rubio to Donald Trump.

The two Senate candidates differed starkly on a number of issues — including guns, health care, foreign policy, economic issues and abortion. Each sought to leverage voter discontent with both the GOP and Democratic nominees.

Rubio held onto had a narrow lead in polling going into Election Day over Murphy, who was abandoned by his own party after Democratic bosses decided to pull ad money from expensive Florida and invest it in Missouri, North Carolina and Indiana, instead.

- The Associated Press

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6:09 p.m.

Deputy Secretary of State Suzanne Staiert is arguing the office doesn't "believe this outage caused what's being described," pointing out a similar outage happened in 2014, and "did not cause people the inability to vote."

She pointed out that anyone in line at 7 p.m. will still be able to vote.

Dep. SOS: I have serious doubts we could convey that message (about proposed extension) to counties or to voters in an equal way.

Lawyers for the Colorado Republican Party are arguing against extending voting times in court, saying they are concerned about making a longer day for poll workers and notifying every county in the state.

They argued that polls continued to stay open during the system's downtime.

GOP: Concerned about longer day for workers, notifying all 64 counties. Says polls were open during period system was down.

Authorities in Texas say a Donald Trump supporter was arrested today for trying to vote twice. He said he worked for Trump and was testing the system, according to the Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office.

Arrest: We can confirm 1 arrested for attempting to vote a second time. Claimed he worked for Trump and was testing the system.

Colorado Democrats say the outage "was like a car accident, and traffic just piled up and voters were forced to wait." They argue that voters did not get a continuous 12-hour window to vote, and some were "forced" to leave polling locations.

The judge has asked cameras to be turned off. No expanded media requests were filed beforehand.

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5:54 p.m.

The Associated Press has called Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia for Donald Trump, and has called Vermont for Hillary Clinton. Several other states are leaning toward either candidate at the moment:

The Secretary of State's Office says it is opposed to the motion to extend voting to 9 p.m. in Colorado.

"The outage didn't stop anyone from voting," office spokeswoman Lynn Bartels tweeted. "We have had two weeks of voting and everyone got a ballot. We have no reports of long lines and anyone in line at 7 can still vote."

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5:26 p.m.

State Democrats have requested voting in Colorado be extended until 9 p.m. The hearing is ongoing. State voting systems went down for 29 minutes statewide earlier Tuesday afternoon.

The Secretary of State's Office says lawyers for the state Democratic Party is going to the court to try and extend voting hours by 25 minutes after systems statewide went down for 29 minutes earlier in the day.

Dems going to court to try to keep polls open an additional 25 minutes. #copolitics

Unaffiliated and Republican voters in Colorado continued their strong turnout during Election Day, according to numbers released Tuesday afternoon by the Secretary of State’s Office.

The latest tally was as of 2:11 p.m. and shows that 73,551 unaffiliated ballots were either dropped off or filled out in person Tuesday. Republicans have so far turned in 64,406 ballots and Democrats have so far turned in 47,033 ballots Tuesday.

The latest figures mean the Republican vote gap grew to 36,000 through the first half of Tuesday. That’s more than double the close-to 18,000 gap in this morning’s data.

Bartels said the system was down for 29 minutes, from 2:47 p.m. to 3:16 p.m.

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3:09 p.m.

Voter registration systems statewide are confirmed to have temporarily gone down statewide in Colorado as of roughly 3 p.m., according to the Denver Elections Office.

Denver7 is working to confirm the full extent of the outages and how long they are expected to last.

The spokeswoman for the Secretary of State's Office says the system is down in "some parts" of the state. She said while the system is down, clerks will not be able to process mail-in ballots and in-person voters must use a provisional ballot.

MEDIA: Our voter registration system is down in some parts of the state. We will let you know when it is up. #copolitics

Got a question for the Denver Elections officials? You can call or text 303-653-9668.

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12:20 p.m.

The Arapahoe County clerk is reporting wait times of 35 minutes at Potters House of Denver, 25 minutes at New Life Community Church, five minutes at Tallyns Reach Library, 25 minutes at Smoky Hill Library, 30 minutes at South Glenn Library, 45 minutes at Centrepoint and 30 minutes at Aurora City Hall.

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11:21 a.m.

Denver7 investigative reporter Jace Larson said election officials in Adams, Arapahoe, Jefferson and Douglas counties have told him they are getting reports about lines to vote, but no problems worth mentioning.

Registered Colorado Republicans saw ­their voting lead increase to more than 18,000 over registered Democrats heading into Election Day voting, and turnout numbers in Colorado are likely to top 2012’s 71 percent turnout.

The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office released numbers Tuesday morning that show the total number of ballots submitted so far by party affiliation through Monday. The office is expected to release final voting numbers Wednesday morning.

But the numbers through Tuesday showed unaffiliated voters surged Monday, turning in 129,176 ballots, compared to 119,365 turned in by Republicans and 108,032 by Democrats.

The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office updates the number of ballots returned via mail and votes made in-person each day, and breaks down the votes by which party each person who submitted a ballot is registered for.

Every ballot is categorized by each voter’s registration and does not say how a person voted. Colorado law allowed county clerks to start counting ballots on Oct. 24.

The county clerk's offices open the windows on the ballots to check their signatures and validate them, then scan the results. However, the results will not be tallied or released until after the polls close on Tuesday.

Republicans widened their voting lead to more than 18,000 ballot submissions more than Democrats as of Tuesday morning. Despite a Monday push by unaffiliated voters, the largest electorate in Colorado, they still sit nearly 100,000 votes behind Democrats and about 115,000 behind Republicans.

As of Tuesday morning’s tally, 2,215,258 ballots had been submitted in the Colorado, which amounts to 67.7 percent turnout of active registered voters in the state (last tallied Nov. 1).

That means Colorado is likely to exceed, and could shatter, the 71 percent turnout it saw in the 2012 presidential election, though that did not utilize an all-mail ballot system as this year’s election does.

The percentage of ballots submitted so far by each party breaks down like this as of Tuesday morning: Republicans 34.84 percent; Democrats 34 percent and unaffiliated voters 29.65 percent. Libertarians have submitted about 1 percent of ballots.

The real difference shows up in the percentage of each party that has turned out to vote so far: 74.8 percent of Republicans have already voted, as have 72.3 percent of Democrats. But only 57.6 percent of unaffiliated voters – which boast 100,000 more voters than both Democrats and Republicans – have already submitted their ballot.

That means Colorado could see a late push again Tuesday by unaffiliated voters who have yet to turn in their ballots or want to vote in person.

The race in bell-weather Jefferson County remains virtually a dead heat. Republicans hold a 500-vote lead over Democrats, though unaffiliated voters sit just behind by 2,000 votes. Voter turnout is already at 71 percent as of Tuesday morning.

Larimer County also remains close: unaffiliated voters, Republicans and Democrat ballot submissions are separated by less than 5,000 votes, though it is another county that could see a late surge by unaffiliated voters, who outnumber the other parties by at least 10,000.

Turnout in Larimer County was just under 70 percent as of Tuesday morning. In 2012, 93 percent of active registered voters in the county cast a ballot.

Boulder County (73.7 percent) and Douglas County (75 percent) have among the highest turnout in the state so far.

In 2012, more than 800,000 votes were cast on Election Day in Colorado, and nearly 38 percent were from unaffiliated voters.

It’s unlikely those numbers will be reached this year, as that would put Colorado above 90 percent turnout.

Denver7 will update election numbers as they come in and adjust to the latest voter registration numbers. In Colorado, people can register to vote up to and on Election Day, so percentages will change some.

Stay posted to the Election 2016 live blog for the latest election updates in Colorado and nationwide.